Irène Némirovsky: Her Life and Works (review)

“Irène Némirovsky was virtually unknown in the English-speaking world until the spring of 2006, when her posthumous novel Suite française appeared in an English version” (p. ix)—this opening statement of Jonathan Weiss’s biography of the prolific French Jewish writer Némirovsky explains why his own account of Némirovsky’s life appeared in an English translation only after having been published first in France. We can be glad that Weiss’s book, originally written in French with a French audience in mind, thus found its way to English-speaking readers, for whom Weiss has added a helpful preface to his book.

Némirovsky is a fascinating but not necessarily easy subject to write about. Her literary creativity and novelistic productivity is enormous but of rather uneven quality—a feature which pertains even to her magnum opus, Suite française. Her attitude towards her ethnic and national origins and cultural affiliations is at times contradictory and could be elucidated fully only when discussed within the complex tensions that governed the relationship between Western and Eastern Europe, between Jews and gentile French culture, between antifascist resistance and Vichy collaboration.

Weiss does not present his readers with a map of the multi-layered cultural and political landscape of France before and during World War II in which a non-French born, Jewish woman author from Russia was pressed by the conventions of the Parisian literary marketplace and later by the political events of the French nation at large to make some very hard decisions. Rather, he focuses on Némirovsky’s work itself, which he reads against the backdrop of biographical information, much of which he had to put together himself without being able to rely on much help from other scholars. Némirovsky’s daughter Elisabeth Gille authored a fictitious rendition of her mother’s life (with the subtitle Mémoires rêvés) which is hardly reliable as a biographical document but very telling as an attempt by the offspring to understand the predicaments of their parents who, like Némirovsky, were killed by the Nazis. The only other scholarly biography of Némirovsky, La vie d’Irène Némirovsky by Patrick Lienhardt and Olivier Philipponnat, was published in France in 2007, and one will be intrigued to learn how this volume will complement Weiss’s book. In the absence of Lienhardt’s and Philipponnat’s biography— which may yield new insights gained from extensive research in Némirovsky’s home country—Weiss offers a succinct and yet most valuable presentation of the critical moments that shaped her life.

Weiss’s straightforward way of introducing Némirovsky’s literary oeuvre, of elegantly scanning her main aesthetic objectives, and of discussing the many intersections between the turns of her life and her literary production leaves it to the reader to come to terms with some of the difficult questions which Weiss poses more or less in passing.

One of the most important of them undoubtedly concerns Némirovsky’s attitude towards her Jewishness—a topic which indeed can hardly be dealt with properly without reconstructing the confluences of national and class politics (Némirovsky “led the glamorous life of the wealthy-upper-middle class,” as the French-Jewish novelist Myriam Anissimov writes in her preface to the French edition to Suite française), the desires and pressures associated with the command of acculturation, the threat of antisemitism and, last but not least, the curious contract established between French readers and writers, signed already by Marcel Proust, that strangely rendered the author’s Jewishness almost illegible. Or it reproduced, as in the case of Némirovsky’s David Golder, highly problematic portrayals of Jewish life which turned the author into one of the darlings “of a significant portion of the extreme right-wing press” (p. 56).

But again, it clearly would have gone beyond the framework of a biography to address the very context in which N...